Dell 30-inch flat panel monitorI almost hit my first real weight-loss goal and it landed me my new monitor (a Dell 3007WFP-HC) as a result of my wife surprising me by ordering it a couple of pounds before I really hit the goal. Unfortunately, I’ve gone up another pound since then which puts me even farther out. Anyway, that’s a subject for a different blog (click here for my fitness journey).

Anyway, ignoring my feelings of guilt, I’ve been amazed at how nice this screen really is. It is absolutely huge. To the point where at first I was wondering if it was going to be too big for me to get used to. Luckily, that turned out to be nowhere near the case after using it for maybe a whole five minutes.

The resolution on this thing is the highest I’ve seen if not counting multi-mon configurations–2560×1600 pixels. It requires a video card that supports DVI-D (dual link) though it turns out you only really need one cable connected to your PC–I figured the “dual” bit meant you’d have two cables but that just shows my ignorance when it comes to video. Anyway, I’ve got an Nvidia GeForce 7600 GT which came with the computer I bought earlier this year. So far, it’s handling this monster just fine.

I haven’t played any games on it yet which I might still try at some point. I’m guessing World of Warcraft would look pretty incredible at this size but I’m scared it’ll get me again–that thing’s geek crack. I have however been using it with Visual Studio, Excel, Photoshop, etc. and all of them are a much improved experience with all the extra real estate. Vista is really nice in general as well–the Sidebar is much taller now so I can get a few more gadgets on it, Dreamscene backgrounds look crazy at this size, and simple things like using pictures of my little one as my background make her look twice her actual size. Click the image below to see what I’m talking about (click here to go directly to the actual size version):

The only thing that took me a while to figure out though was whether or not I had a fully compliant HDCP system now. Frankly, I don’t really know or going to look into what it really means to have such a system other than the fact that I’ve gathered you need one to playback HD-DVD content. The computer came with a Toshiba HD-DVD drive but so far I haven’t been able to use it and I’ve been blaming it on my previous monitor (a Samsung 213T flat panel). I have no idea if it really didn’t support HDCP but I never really had much of a need to watch movies on my computer so I didn’t spend much time researching it. That still hasn’t really changed but I was a little more curious now as I haven’t yet seen what HD-DVD quality is like and the size of this thing makes it a little more appealing.

Unfortunately, I inserted the Bourne Supremacy disc into the drive and I got nothing. After searching the web for about half an hour and coming up empty, I decided to see if it’s a setting maybe on my video card that needs to be set to make this happen. Turns out that was exactly what I needed to do. The downer though is that I couldn’t get it to work at 1080i–only 720p worked. But at least it worked. If you’re stuck in the same situation, all you need to do is head over to Control Panel->Display Settings->Advanced Settings->GeForce 7600 GT tab->Start the NVIDIA Control Panel->Change the signal or HD format->and select 720p HDTV from the list. For me, it defaults to “Non-HDTV format” when it’s set to max resolution. Selecting 1080i or 720p drops it’s resolution down significantly and the former actually fails to play HD-DVD video so it’s kind of pointless. If anyone out there knows of something I may be doing wrong, please let me know!